46 pages • 1 hour read
Ian McEwanLessons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3
Chapter 9 Summary
In 2001, four years after Daphne returned to Peter, a now 16-year-old Lawrence returns to his and Roland’s home in London after traveling in Europe. Lawrence explains how while in Munich he had tried to track down his mother, via her agent, Rudiger. Lawrence had done this by finding Alissa’s address on Rudiger’s desk while visiting him.
Lawrence tells Roland how when he had called at his mother’s house, she had been utterly dismissive of him, insulting him and telling him that she did not want to see him again. When Lawrence heads out, Roland continues writing in a notebook chronicling the events of his life, the people he had seen, and his thoughts on literature and politics.
The next morning Roland receives a call from the police. Roland is worried that the call is about Lawrence, but it turns out to be related to Cornell. An inspector visits his house to ask about her. The inspector says the police are now looking into cases of historic abuse and tells Roland, “You’re a victim” (335), encouraging him to press charges. Later, with Lawrence’s help and the internet, Roland finds Cornell’s address.
By pretending to want piano lessons, Roland arranges a meeting with Cornell at her house. When Roland confronts her about what she did and tells her about the police, Cornell explains that she had been in a vulnerable place before meeting Roland. She says that she had just had a bad breakup and an abortion, and this made her susceptible to falling in love with Roland, especially when he called at her door after she had tried to forget him. Roland is conflicted over Cornell’s explanation. However, Cornell tells Lawrence that she will plead guilty if he presses charges; she has no dependents, so there would not have to be a trial.
Chapter 10 Summary
Nine years later, in 2010, Roland, now in his early 60s, spends most of his time reading or writing in his journal. Jane, Alissa’s mother, has by this point died, and Alissa didn’t invite Roland to the funeral. Jane had fallen out with Alissa toward the end of her life due to her memoir about her childhood, In Murnau. In this book Alissa “presented Jane Farmer as an embittered woman hollowed out by a sense of failure” and criticized her mother for giving her a loveless upbringing (368).
Roland recalls visiting his own mother some five years earlier, in a home where she was dying and had dementia. Indeed, at this point, “[a]s he saw it she was already dead” (374). After one such visit Roland learns, from a letter that his half sister, Susan, received, that he has a full brother whose existence his parents had concealed from him. Shortly after, Roland meets this brother, Robert, and learns that he was born in 1944 to Roland’s parents, Robert and Rosalind, while Rosalind’s then-husband was still fighting in Europe.
To avoid the criticism attached to raising a child out of wedlock from an adulterous affair, Roland’s parents had given Robert up for adoption as a baby. Roland also recalls his mother dying of vascular dementia, several months after his meeting with Robert; Roland gave a eulogy at the funeral. Worried about his own future, and prompted by Peter leaving Daphne, Roland asks Daphne to marry him, to which she says yes. Just a few days later, when Daphne visits Roland at the hotel where he works to celebrate, and where Roland also bumps into Ruth and Florian, Daphne reveals that she has terminal cancer.
Chapter 11 Summary
Seven years after Daphne’s death, in 2018, Roland prepares to scatter Daphne’s ashes in the place in the Lake District she had requested. Peter wants to help Roland perform this rite, against Daphne’s wishes, and shows up at Roland’s home as he is preparing to go. Roland describes the last few months of Daphne’s life between her diagnosis and her death. Daphne had refused treatment and decided to travel with Roland and her family. They all went on a holiday to an island off the south coast of France, where her mood, and that of the group, vacillated between sorrow and joy, and Daphne discussed her fears with Roland. Daphne “dreaded the helplessness, the humiliation at the end almost as much as the pain” (409).
After six days, Roland and Daphne went on a road trip alone, to the northeast of France, and the rest of the family left for their respective homes. Daphne and Roland visited a small hotel where they had first made love and fallen in love. Finally, they visited a place in the Lake District that Daphne had gone to as a child with her father, and where she wanted her ashes scattered.
In the present, as Roland is preparing to scatter Daphne’s ashes in the place she requested, he sees Peter approaching him. They have another confrontation: Roland still does not want to let Peter participate in the process, and this degenerates into a physical fight. Peter pushes Roland into a river and scatters Daphne’s ashes while Roland is incapacitated. When Roland returns from the trip, his family is throwing a surprise 70th-birthday party for him.
Chapter 12 Summary
Toward the end of the first Covid lockdown in Britain, in the summer of 2020, Roland is annotating all the photographs from his past and reflecting wistfully on his youth. The decision to see Cornell when he was 14 is a moment Roland dwells on.
Roland receives a phone call from Alissa’s former agent, Rudiger. He tells Roland that Alissa has just had her foot amputated, due to her smoking, and that she wants to see Roland again in Germany. Roland is also sent a copy of her latest novel, Her Slow Reduction. The novel involves a character Roland believes is a proxy for him, a husband living in London whom the protagonist leaves. Roland is angered because this character beats his wife. Roland thinks the novel implies the “lying accusation” that Roland had beaten Alissa.
To address this, Roland goes to visit Alissa in Germany. When Roland arrives, Alissa greets him jovially, although she is drinking heavily and has become a shadow of the woman he knew. Alissa also denies the comparison between the character in her novel and Roland, pointing out that the former was also, unlike Roland, six feet tall and blond. Alissa also reveals that Roland is “the only man I ever loved” and that she is dying of cancer (463).
On returning to England, Roland learns that Lawrence is refusing to visit Alissa despite Alissa having emailed to ask him. At the novel’s end, in 2022, Roland returns home after passing a health check, then talks to his granddaughter, Stefanie, about how he wants to read a “pretend book” involving “absolutely everybody” that he knows.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
Roland agonizes about whether to go and see Cornell. He recalls the line in his poem “dirt of the grave in her hair” (343). This suggests, on the one hand, that seeing her would be equivalent to digging up a corpse. He would be reawakening associations, problems, and desires that were better left buried. On the other hand, his recollection of the poem, and the idea of the ghost or the half-dead corpse, suggests that Roland still has unfinished business that is haunting him. The visit turns out, at least on the surface, to be worthwhile. Cornell, despite some initial hostility, explains why she made inappropriate sexual advances to Roland, due to the difficulties of her own situation at time. She also explains that what Roland calls the “sadistic element” of her behavior was really a defense mechanism to conceal the depth of her feelings.
Something similar appears to play out with Alissa. As with Cornell, Roland is torn over whether to visit his ex-wife and whether the visit will simply rake up old problems. Yet, as with Cornell, Roland ostensibly finds the meeting to be redemptory. Alissa acknowledges that she had been equally responsible for the tensions and frustrations in their relationship. Casting aside pride, she implies that it was the demands of her art, not any deficiency in Roland, that forced her to go.
The impression of redemption and neat closure with both women is in some ways illusory. While it seems at first that Roland has settled accounts with his past, finding forgiveness and understanding through seeing Cornell and Alissa, in both instances more questionable motives are at play. At first, Cornell is dismissive of Roland and only contrite when the possibility of police action is mentioned. Before that threat she mocks Roland’s desire to “move on” and says, “Poor thing. You haven’t got over it, have you?” (348).
Alissa may be motivated by guilt and loneliness as much as genuine contrition to provide a false sense of closure for Roland. As Roland observes, “Now, she had no one, no family. No close friends” (467). Getting Roland to visit when she knew she was dying may have been a way to assuage her own sense of regret and regain some human connection at the end of her life. Likewise, telling Roland that he was the only man she ever loved may have been a way of assuaging her sense of guilt for how she had ignored him down the years. Indeed, having a character similar to Roland in her last book can be seen as a confused acknowledgment of her previous neglect.
Conversely, Roland may be confusing a sense of “victory” over Alissa, as well as the egotistical boon of being told he was her only true love, with something more meaningful. Roland takes a certain delight in observing not only that Alissa is lonely but that she has physically degenerated. As he notes, “the beautiful look of the woman he loved” now looked like it “had been painted onto the surface of an uninflated balloon” (461). It is not surprising that Roland would want to conceal such petty motives, and his desire to get back at Alissa, behind the idea that he had achieved some important piece of self-understanding.
In this way, Peter’s attitude toward closure is, ironically, more honest. Although Peter’s bludgeoning his way into scattering Daphne’s ashes in the face of her wishes is selfish, his actions suggest that “closure” is ultimately a performance. Like the eulogy given at a funeral, the idea of resolution, in a relationship or life, is a social rite performed to maintain psychological equilibrium, not a substantial reality. This is captured when Peter says to Roland, “Let’s get it over with. I’ve booked a table for lunch at Askham Hall” (426).
In contrast, Roland learns this lesson only very late in life. Influenced by his encounters with Peter, Cornell, and Alissa, Roland starts to see that a definite narrative imposed upon a life, or aspects of it, is just a consoling illusion. This realization is symbolized by Roland’s giving up on annotating his collection of past photographs. It is also seen by Roland’s burning of his arduously created journals. In the end he discovers that stories and lives do not have to have any clear point. As he says to Stefanie at the novel’s close, “A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson” (481-82). Open-ended and ambiguous, such stories, like history, can be enjoyed for their creativity and richness in the moment.
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